The Artdog Quote(s) of the Week
Why is it so difficult for some people to believe that feminism and gender equality isn't a one-way street that only favors women? But the shift from unbalanced to balanced is proving to be harder to achieve than it should be.
It would be so excellent, if everyone could accept that a balanced society works better. Peace can only come with justice, and even such a cold-edged discipline as economics agrees there's more stability in a more egalitarian system.
Centuries of tradition have brought us to this off-kilter moment. Throughout those centuries we most definitely did not have balanced societies. They almost invariably were, in fact, radically unbalanced.
In the West, we've had a lopsided social structure that oppressed essentially everyone except for certain privileged, white cisgender men. In nearly every society, women have historically been an underclass.
My Quotes of the Week this month are inspired by Women's Equality Day. In each post I have tried to bring up a different angle on the equality equation. Last week I brought you daddies bonding with babies. Unfortunately, this week's post is a lot more grim.
That's the only "joke" you'll get from me in this post. In any unequal relationship, violence is implied--but that violence all too often becomes explicit and bloody. We can see it in civil unrest, fraught racial tensions, in violent crime, and most definitely in relationships between men and women. We're still a long way from making a shift from unbalanced to balanced.
According to the latest statistics I've been able to find, considerably more than 1 in 3 U.S. women (35.6%) are raped or physically harmed by men they know, in their lifetimes. Women are overwhelmingly the victims in domestic violence cases.
Just under half of the women murdered in a given year are the victims of men they know (Women kill men they know at a quarter of that rate).
Perhaps most chilling of all, the leading cause of death among pregnant women isn't obstetrical complications--it's murder. Usually at the hands of their husbands, partners or lovers--that is, their babies' fathers.
The likelihood triples when the father doesn't want the pregnancy. Think about that, in the contemporary climate of more and more limits being placed on the availability of abortions. We can't make the shift from unbalanced to balanced soon enough, for all too many women alive today.
IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to Tigress and Butterfly Files, for the aspirational but unattributed quote at the start of this post, to Coolnsmart, for the (again, unattributed) "kitchen" quote, and to AZ Quotes for the image-quote from Margaret Atwood, which all too aptly sums up one of the most unbalanced aspects of our society.
Why is it so difficult for some people to believe that feminism and gender equality isn't a one-way street that only favors women? But the shift from unbalanced to balanced is proving to be harder to achieve than it should be.
It would be so excellent, if everyone could accept that a balanced society works better. Peace can only come with justice, and even such a cold-edged discipline as economics agrees there's more stability in a more egalitarian system.
Centuries of tradition have brought us to this off-kilter moment. Throughout those centuries we most definitely did not have balanced societies. They almost invariably were, in fact, radically unbalanced.
In the West, we've had a lopsided social structure that oppressed essentially everyone except for certain privileged, white cisgender men. In nearly every society, women have historically been an underclass.
My Quotes of the Week this month are inspired by Women's Equality Day. In each post I have tried to bring up a different angle on the equality equation. Last week I brought you daddies bonding with babies. Unfortunately, this week's post is a lot more grim.
That's the only "joke" you'll get from me in this post. In any unequal relationship, violence is implied--but that violence all too often becomes explicit and bloody. We can see it in civil unrest, fraught racial tensions, in violent crime, and most definitely in relationships between men and women. We're still a long way from making a shift from unbalanced to balanced.
According to the latest statistics I've been able to find, considerably more than 1 in 3 U.S. women (35.6%) are raped or physically harmed by men they know, in their lifetimes. Women are overwhelmingly the victims in domestic violence cases.
Just under half of the women murdered in a given year are the victims of men they know (Women kill men they know at a quarter of that rate).
Perhaps most chilling of all, the leading cause of death among pregnant women isn't obstetrical complications--it's murder. Usually at the hands of their husbands, partners or lovers--that is, their babies' fathers.
The likelihood triples when the father doesn't want the pregnancy. Think about that, in the contemporary climate of more and more limits being placed on the availability of abortions. We can't make the shift from unbalanced to balanced soon enough, for all too many women alive today.
IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to Tigress and Butterfly Files, for the aspirational but unattributed quote at the start of this post, to Coolnsmart, for the (again, unattributed) "kitchen" quote, and to AZ Quotes for the image-quote from Margaret Atwood, which all too aptly sums up one of the most unbalanced aspects of our society.
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